Now upgrading is less stressful knowing that your site visitors get a much friendlier and customisable message saying that your site is currently under maintenance.

The plugin is developed by Michael Woehrer who has developed the plugin for free so if you like it feel free to send him a donation as he currently doesn’t support it due to lack to time most likely trying to earn a living like the rest of us.

Example of the default maintenance screen.

Well today I needed to setup apache 2.2 which I had already installed however when I tried to start apache with httpd start, all I would get is an error related to some error of no such file or directory for some modules that required loading in the http.conf file.

Well after sometime Googling for answers, I found out that in the /etc/ httpd/conf directory there is a file httpd.conf.bak that works right out of the box. Just cp this to httpd.conf and then run /etc/init.d/httpd start and you should find your web server is now up and running.

Check it by opening a browser and going to http://localhost

Many Adwords users simply get into the Adwords keyword tool and start adding all sorts of related keywords to their campaign trying to drive traffic and conversions to their site often overlooking the fact that in many cases their web site doesn’t support their keyword list.

Google is predominatly about relevancy and just adding keywords to your Adwords campaign is only part of creating an effective campaign.  Create adgroups that target similar keywords and then push those targeted keywords to most relevant page on your site.  If your landing pages don’t contain information related to keywords in your adgroup keyword list then you can bet that your keywords will become inactive or you’ll have to bid alot more to target those keywords.

Need help with an Adwords campaign?

Within Adwords you can use Googles keyword tool to find possible negative keywords which you can add into your campaign in either campaign level or ad-group level. Doing this will increase your click through rate, reducing cost per click and a lower cost per conversion.

Start with words like free or cheap which if your running a business most likely are not the customers you are looking for if your trying to sell products. You will need to do this for all your campaigns and ad-groups and if you don’t find negative keywords then your doing something wrong. Need help with your Adwords campaign?

We tried everything from uninstalling drivers and reinstalling which worked ok for a couple of minutes. We ran live version of Linux but it still happened, we ran anti virus thinking it was some sort of malware, and we googled until our eyes were red raw looking for others who may have solved the crazy mouse.

Eventually we ran out of ideas and just sat back pondering, occassionally trying again with drivers, looking, searching for something, anything that may help. What we did notice from others who had posted what appeared to be a similar issue was that it was a common thing with Dell Laptops, but still we couldn’t find the problem.

Then whilst trying to move the mouse again we found it we pushed the little stick that is standard with many laptops as part of the keyboard hard top-right we could stabilse the mouse. Then we remember that we could disable the stick option in the mouse hardware settings so that’s what we did, and sure enough it fixed the crazy mouse.

Not sure why the stick in the keyboard started going whacky but since my mate had never really used it anyway we didn’t really care. So is your Dell suffering the crazy mouse syndrome?

Looking for web design video tutorials and graphic design video tutorials? Well a great resource where you’ll find video tutorials on a range of software from Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, 3Ds Max, Quark, Illustrator and more can be found at www.video-tutes.com

Shortcuts are a real timesaver in any application and Flash Actionscript has no shortage of them. How many times have you ever had to type the stop(); action? Well there is a better way…

Firstly you need to choose to diplay the shortcuts by making sure you have this option selected in the actions panel group menu. See example below.

Then you can go over to the actions toolbox and you see all the shortcut keys available. See example below.

As you’ll see in the Actions tool box you’ll find that you can now quickly do a stop action by hitting the escape key and then typing st or the unload move command by typing esc-um.

Pretty cool hey and will save you heaps of time. Hope you enjoy it.. I know I will.

2 Feb 08 UPDATE:  Unfortunately the shortcuts aren’t available if your using AS3.

So here’s what happens… A client wants to build a web site for their business. They find a web designer, they tell the designer that they need a domain name and most web designers can help here often reselling domain name registration at a profit. Sometimes a huge profit depending on if they are pretty unethical. The web designer then registers the domain name but instead of registering the domain in the clients name they register it in their own name.

So what’s the big deal? Well, if you ever want to change web designers for any reason you might find that you can’t access your domain which could have serious implications particularly if you have built some serious brand awareness.

An example, a friend of mine has a website and has had it for quite a few years. His domain name is his businessname and many people know the site and the domain name.
I told him I could save him some money by changing his web hosting however I find out that his current web host also registered his domain name for him and you guessed it… it’s registered in the company name of the reseller hosting provider. So that throws a serious spanner in the works and could cause some real problems for my friend if we want to move the site.

So either register the domain name yourself or make sure you mention to the web designer that you want the domain registered in your name not theirs.